Richard Hermann: Democracy in the Middle East - and Midwest

Collective bargaining is the essence of unionizing and has nothing to do with the hemorrhaging of state funds. It was management, not labor, that invested in the garbage Wall Street was snake-oiling.

Richard Hermann

One of my co-workers at the Pentagon back in the day came to his job in Washington after a stint as the official food taster for King Idris and Queen Fatima of Libya. Bob was a career U.S. civil servant assigned to Wheelus Air Force Base near Tripoli. Twice a day, he and his driver picked up hot meals flown in by U.S. military aircraft from Athens and transported them to the palace. On the drive, Bob was required to taste every dish in case someone tried to poison the monarchs. His bizarre job was part of our Status of Forces Agreement with Libya. By his third year on the poison watch, the job was beginning to get to him. He may have been the only American elated when Col. Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy and got him a ticket home.

Sadly, it has taken the Libyans more than 40 years to become disgusted enough with their demented dictator to try to do something about him. This is one Middle Eastern revolution that we should all be excited about. Gaddafi is a monster, notwithstanding his recent renunciation of his long career as the poster boy for terrorist sponsorship and weapons of mass destruction.

At least the governor of Wisconsin is not firing live ammunition into the sea of demonstrators gathered in Madison, in contrast to Gaddafi, the King of Bahrain and other Middle Eastern tyrants. But that is not to say that he is any less hostile to democracy.

The public employee unions in Wisconsin did not cause the financial crisis in which the cheese head state finds itself. It was management, not labor, that invested its workers’ and taxpayers’ contributions to the public employee pension plan in the garbage Wall Street was snake-oiling. Wisconsin’s managers should have known better. Not every state was this stupid or reckless. It was management that flushed these billions down the toilet.

Sure, public employee unions need to contribute much more to their own retirement, just like those of us who spent our careers in the private sector have to do. The piddling 12 percent that Wisconsin state workers are required to contribute to their very generous pension plan is peanuts and needs to be raised. In return, the government has to commit to investing the money wisely and conservatively, with specific sanctions (including rolling heads) if it acts irresponsibly. Gov. Scott Walker is dead wrong to try to limit collective bargaining rights as part of his blatantly ideological and crassly political plan to right his state’s dismal finances by busting unions and thereby conveniently diminishing their ability to support Democrats in election years.

Collective bargaining is the essence of unionizing and has nothing to do with the hemorrhaging of state funds. If management is irresponsible or dumb enough to agree to a bad deal with its workers, too bad. No one held a gun to their heads.

Wisconsin is one of those politically competitive states that alternate between Democratic and Republican governors, so the blame for monumental mismanagement is a shared one. Wisconsin is also one of the many states that have a long history of issuing bond prospectuses that were silent about how badly underfunded its pension funds are. By any measure, this is false advertising by management. The public employee unions were not complicit in these lies. Righting Wisconsin’s sinking ship of state should not be done at the expense of union bargaining rights.